Glimpses of Darwin’s Voyage

Glimpses of Darwin’s Voyage
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was an English naturalist. He was a geologist and biologist, and shall be remembered in history of the evolution of human understanding of nature through his contributions to the science of evolution. His proposition that all species of life have descended from common ancestors is now widely accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. While many of his ideas have got refined over time and some of them even debunked, his contribution to the evolution of life on this planet and the understanding of the interplay of natural processes in origin, modification and diversification of species have immortalised him and his pursuit of this esoteric branch of science.
‘A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.’, he wrote; signifying the discipline and commitment that he displayed while pursuing his passion in cracking the conundrum of how man evolved over the earth. His journeys and the meticulous and painstaking activity of collecting plant and animal species across the world speaks volumes about the man’s character and determination.
In 1831, at an age of 22, he set sail from England on a five- year voyage aboard HMS Beagle, a naval survey ship to collect plant and animal specimens from the countries and islands that the ship visited. In 1859 he published his epochal and path breaking book, The Origin of Species. Soon the world was to know, appreciate, realise and accept that the creation of world is a process of millions of years of natural selection and countless interactions of extremely slow and complex phenomena of interplay of natural forces. The belief that God created humans, the beasts and the plants in a six- day enterprise got a serious relook.
He maintained a careful and candid account of matters, men and events that he met, encountered and interacted with. One such place was Santa Fay, or Santa Fe, a part of Argentina today.
Santa Fe or to be correct, Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz is a flourishing town today and is the capital of the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. It is the eighth largest town of Argentina with a population of over 650 thousand.
Today’s blog post describes his description of practices prevalent those days that are quaint and amusing but also shocking and even barbaric.
His observations about the town, and its rulers go like this,
‘Santa Fe is a quiet little town, and is kept clean and in good order. The governor, Lopez, was a common soldier at the time of the revolution, but has now been seventeen years in power. This stability of government is owing to his tyrannical habits, for tyranny seems as yet better adapted to these countries than republicanism.’
It so happened that he developed a headache while staying on this island. It was a rather nasty one. He wrote in his diary, ’I was confined for these two days to my bed by a headache. A god-natured old woman, who attended me, wished me to try many old remedies. A common practice is to bind an orange leaf or a bit of black plaster (medical dressing) to each temple; and a still more general plan is to split a bean into halves, moisten them, and place one on each temple, where they will easily adhere.
‘It is not thought proper ever to remove the beans or plaster, but to allow them to drop off; and sometimes if a man with patches on his head is asked what is the matter, he will answer,” I had a headache the day before yesterday.’
‘Many of the remedies used by the people are ludicrously strange, but too disgusting to be mentioned. One of the least nasty is to kill and cut open two puppies and bind them on each side of a broken limb. Little hairless dogs are in great request to sleep at the feet of invalids.”
A more shocking observation is on the treatment meted out to the original inhabitants of this island. He writes, ‘The governor’s favourite occupation is hunting Indians; a short time since he slaughtered forty- eight and sold the children at the rate of three or four pounds apiece.’
Many years later, the great rationalist Darwin said, ‘The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason’. One wonders whether he ever visited the writings recorded in his diary many decades ago and re-thought about such practices.
But all said and done, Darwin’s mind was so disciplined and trained and orderly that he felt, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”.
Uday Kumar Varma
October 03, 2021